Soapbox: Climate change argument a convenient truth for those who want to control your pocketbook

I’ve sat by and watched as the City Council swallows the manmade climate change argument from the left-leaning politicians, hook, line and sinker. My conscience and my pocketbook are telling me to write this soapbox.

While I recognize that it might not be popular in this atmosphere of progressive political correctness, I must write this in an attempt to express some common sense in the midst of an argument filled with politically charged terms and carefully selected facts.

My first assertion is that the majority of these claims about climate change come from politicians who want to control your pocketbook and, ultimately, your life. One source for this assertion is MIT professor Richard Lindzen, a noted authority on climate change. In a recent interview with WBZ-TV in Boston, he is quoted as saying, “Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. The opportunities for taxation, for policies, for control, for crony capitalism are just immense, you can see their eyes bulge …”

Second, the city government of Fort Collins proudly proclaims that it is saving the Earth by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide entering the environment. Its assertions are based on a study sponsored by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lindzen states in another interview published Aug. 8, 2009, that the IPCC calculations overstate the relevance of carbon dioxide by six times. In other words, the IPCC calculations are deliberately skewed. Lindzen states in that interview that, “We now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.”

Third, the goal of the U.N. climate team is spelled out by the chief of that team, Christiana Figueres, who is quoted as saying that communist China has the best system for fighting climate change and democracy has the poorest. This quote comes from the Jan. 14 edition of Bloomberg News. She made this statement at Bloomberg headquarters in New York. Simply stated, those who would push global climate change regulations upon us also would push communism as the answer. Figueres and other proponents don’t seem to recognize that China is now the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world. A rational person might conclude that this effort isn’t about controlling emissions, rather, it’s about bringing communism to the forefront.

I will close by stating that Al Gore, former presidential candidate and purveyor of manmade climate change, made an assertion in 2007 that the polar ice caps would be melted by the end of summer 2013. Obviously, that was a false assertion, and little has been said about it in this and other publications. However, next time the Fort Collins City Council raises your electric utility rates in the name of “climate change prevention,” consider the possibility that it’s based on political science rather than real scientific study.